November 2003
A communication problem of art is the discomfort with which it is faced by the artistically untrained public. The easy solution, which the public adopted to settle its accounts with art, was to restrict art to a luxurious and enclosed space supposedly concerning only a few. The answer to this real problem could have been the reduction of the artistically untrained audience through the expansion of the possibilities of providing artistic education combined with the overthrow of the myth of artistic elitism and social enclosure. However, in the last two decades, a different, easier, faster, but also more superficial method of bridging audience and art was preferred, and probably dominated, which exempts both the educated and the uneducated from the difficulty of approaching the substantial but also elusive dimension of the mystery of art. This method chose the pseudo-scientific interpretation as a tool for artistic analysis, sidelining poetic abstraction. Even the artists preferred to spend more time in the process of "interpreting" art and their art than in its production. Photography was inevitably to star in the spread of this method. Many reasons advocated for this. Its production usually requires minimal time, hence the desire to add verbal analyses to increase its prestige. The apparent information it conveys lends itself to formulating logical-seeming arguments. Its mystery is not obvious, and its surface resists abstraction and tends toward interpretation and proof. It is quite certain that the trend to emphasize the "logical" interpretation of photography at the expense of its poetic discourse will not easily recede. Let's at least hope that respect for the power of mystery and abstraction will be maintained, which cannot be absent when we face photography as art and art as a spiritual work.
Plato Rivellis